Dreams from the Outback

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Jannik Splidsboel

Synopsis

Australia recognised Aboriginals as full citizens in 1967. Until then, they were assimilated with the wildlife of the Outback, the arid back-country, where their population struggled to survive the ferocious colonisation. Jannik Splidsboel set down his camera in the Kimberley region, where the main communities still live, to capture the deleterious effects of such a long denial and establish, through two generations, a sensitive picture of the agony of a culture transformed, among other things, by alcohol: an antidote to humiliations and isolation or a simple means to “forget what we did last night”, as recounted by Felicity, one of the protagonists of the film. Distressed and militant 'pieta', she lives with a white man, with whom she had three children. Reversing an irenic vision of the fossilised folklore of the island-continent’s first inhabitants, Dreams From the Outback empathetically draws out a possible path towards resilience by filming the day-to-day of a family who dreams of being a model to overcome a sense of otherness.
Emmanuel Chicon